Miscellaneous

Capitalism: A Love Story

By jeremyblachman

Saw Michael Moore's film about capitalism.  I feel kind of the same way about this one as I felt about Sicko: Michael Moore is really good at making movies.  They're entertaining, they're compelling... and it's only when thinking about it afterwards that you realize that even if the underlying message sort of makes sense, the movie kind of doesn't, a lot of the examples don't actually make the right point, and a bunch of it is merely "hey, look at this bad thing that happened to these good people," without effectively making the case that it's evil-thing-of-this-particular-movie's fault that this bad thing happened, and that sometimes bad things just happen and it's not entirely fair to blame insurance companies or the government or capitalism.

I think, if the film was trying to be completely honest and straightforward, it wouldn't be called Capitalism, it would be called Corporate America.  Moore's problem isn't with capitalism as an economic system-- it's with large corporations and how they treat their employees.  And how they influence government.  I'm on board that a lot of corporations treat people pretty badly, and have a lot of power in our government, and that in a lot of ways that's probably not a great thing.  But I don't think that necessarily means capitalism is the underlying problem.

If I write more about it, I'll spoil parts of the movie.  So I'll just leave it at that: entertaining movie, but not entirely logical.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on November 01, 2009 (boomark / email).